viii, 204 pages : 25 cm

What is a body? What are our perceptions of our inner body? How are these perceptions influenced? Thinking about the body has become highly fashionable, but the renew focus, while certainly welcome, seems to always end at the body's surface. Recent sociological and feminist theory has made important claims about the prowess of cultural inscription on the body, and about the cultural representation of the body, but the body that appears in this new theory seems to be, ironically, disembodied. If this newly theorized body has interioriy, it is one that is explained predominantly through psychoanalysis. The physiological processes inside the body remain a mystery to be explained, if at all, only in the esoteric language of biomedicine. As a trained biologist, Lynda Birke was frustrated by the gap between feminist cultural analysis and her won scientific background. In this book, she seeks to bridge the this gap by looking "inside" the body, using ideas in anatomy and physiology to develop the feminist view that the biological body is socially and culturally constructed. Birke rejects the assumption that the body's functioning is somehow fixed and unchanging, claiming that biological science offers more than just a deterministic narrative of how nature works. Feminism and the Biological Body puts biological science and feminist theory together and suggests that we need a new politics that includes, rather than denies, our bodily flesh. -- From the Back Cover

Includes bibliographical references (pages 188-200) and index

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